Friday, 21 October 2011

The evil of the EU Con Trick

Greece in 1974 was a nation of old women in black dresses and overburdened donkeys carrying heavy loads up steep narrow cobbled paths under a sky through which roared the F4 Phantoms of Nato's air defence system. The millionaire shipowners moved in international circles, transported by BOAC, whilst the poor were fishermen and subsidence farmers. Fierce shepherds with sharp knives and Lee-Enfield rifles guarded the rocky uplands against wolves and the twentieth century, occasionally raping and dismembering any hippy travellers careless enough to cross their path. The idea that any nation could grow from this to one with a per capita GDP of $30,000 in thirty years is risible; and as Blue Eyes has pointed out, Greece retains a sewer system that can't even cope with toilet paper.

Yet this was the great EU con trick. Jam for all, paid for by a Ponzi banking scheme and transfers from the wealthy to the marginal EU nations. Expectations were raised, poor and gullible populations were led to believe that the change was permanent. The intention of the authors of this gigantic fraud was that Europe would be cajoled into political union before the money ran out and the Ponzi scheme collapsed. It hasn't happened that way.

Now Europe's margins are being forced to shrink back to where they would have been with free trade and open borders alone, without all the funny money. Sure, the wealthy nations are being forced to continue the transfers, less now to ease the transition than as a desperate rear-guard action by the Federasts to keep their dream alive at the cost of the people of Europe. Now is the time for the conned and gulled peoples of Europe to do to the EU what the people of Libya have done to Gaddafy. The evil has gone on long enough.

12 comments:

The really sad thing is that all the transfers were supposed to build a solid foundation for real development. A lot of the money did go into roads and railways which probably did raise productivity in the peripheral countries. But a lot of it also went into building the delusion of wealth as you say. Greece especially used the transfer money and the borrowed money to shower on its citizens. The Greek government systematically lied to the markets and the other EU governments over how much it owed in order to borrow more to squander.

It is kein Wunder that the Germans are loath to shovel more good money when the bad has simply disappeared.

"The Euro is not going to collapse, and if the price of saving it is the death of democracy and national identity in Europe then that price will be paid."

He's spot on. That price is being paid now, and our parliamentary traitors will not extricate us. They won't even let us express the view that we wish to be extricated.

There will be another, terrible, price to pay for this betrayal; I don't know how or when it will be exacted, but sure as hell I wouldn't want to be caught up in it, when the British people have finally had enough.

It is sad that most Germans seem to resent having to subsidise Greece and any other euro country that comes along while Greeks, including even their MEPs, deeply resent the misery of austerity that they blame Germany for imposing on them. So misplaced political "solidarity" is breeding enmity rather than friendship, especially among young people who pay the price of unemployment.

Some years ago a small rural town in Spain twinned with a similar town in Greece. The Mayor of the Greek town visited the Spanish town. When he saw the palatial mansion belonging to the Spanish mayor he wondered how he could afford such a house. The Spaniard said; "You see that bridge over there? The EU gave us a grant to build a two-lane bridge, but by building a single lane bridge with traffic lights at either end this house could be built". The following year the Spaniard visited the Greek town. He was simply amazed at the Greek Mayor's house, gold taps, marble floors, it was marvellous. When he asked how this could be afforded the Greek said; "You see that bridge over there?" The Spaniard replied; "No."